Charles Bernstein's Dark City: Polis, policy, and the policing of poetry

Of course, what many have regarded as a liberating permission to write in otherwise unsanctioned ways will provoke professional sanction-takers to see only red.

(Dark City, 74)(1)

Charles Bernstein's writing, particularly his poetry, tends to generate two kinds of response. First, the mere mention of his name occasions a metonymic substitution: "Bernstein" becomes the means for an evaluation (or attack on, summary, or advocacy) of Language poetry, and his poetry recedes into a more general discussion of the sociology of American poetry-culture. Second, his poetry gets discussed principally in terms of its stylistic features and poetic assumptions, somewhat in accord with Bernstein's own critical pronouncements:

There is no escape in writing (or "elsewhere") from structures/forms, they are everpresent--"de" forming and "re" forming. To see them--to hear them--as inseparable from "content." ... All writing is a demonstration of method; it can assume a method or investigate it. In this sense, style and mode are always at issue[.] ... [A] "constructive" mode would suggests that the mode itself is explored as content, its possibilities of meaning are investigated and presented, and that this process is itself recognized as a method.

(Content's Dream; 72, 226, 227)(2)

Indeed, in this essay I intend to continue some aspects of those two projects of critical consideration. But, after an initial lengthy detour, I would also like to try a different approach to Bernstein's poetry, an approach which, quite improbably, owes its genesis to a strategy undertaken by Helen Vendler in relation to John Ashbery's poetry.

Fifteen years ago, when the name "John Ashbery" occasioned similar critical anxiety as the name "Charles Bernstein" today, Vendler, with great directness, brushed aside the tendency to write (merely) about Ashbery in terms of style:

It seems time to write about John Ashbery's subject matter. His As We Know, will, of course, elicit more remarks on his style--a style so influential that its imitators are legion. It is Ashbery's style that has obsessed reviewers, as they alternately wrestle with its elusive impermeability and praise its power of linguistic synthesis. There have been able descriptions of its fluid syntax, its, insinuating momentum, its generality of reference, its incorporation of vocabulary from all the arts and all the sciences. But it is popularly believed, with some reason that the style itself is impenetrable, that it is impossible to say what an Ashbery poem is "about."

(The New Yorker, March 16, 1981, 108)(3)

Vendler proceeds, in an essay of considerable lucidity and influence, td discuss precisely what Ashbery's poems are about. Similarly, I wonder if it is possible or even desirable to discuss Bernstein's poetry in terms of content? Would such an approach inevitably deform and domesticate (as it thematized and de-mystified/ Bernstein's poetry? Certainly, over the past few years, that is one thing that has happened to Ashbery's poetry: once the cutting edge and the flashpoint for debates about poetry's direction and function, Ashbery's poetry is now seen as an elegant, somewhat wistful, poetically nostalgic but easily thematized poetry on the passage of time, on the phenomenology of dailiness, and on the indirectness and instability of self-portraiture. There is, then, a cost to such an approach: thematized or content-based criticism, in the manner of the New Criticism, inevitably pretends to a unification of material. In the case of Bernstein's poetry, a thematic or content-based approach may falsify his poetry which is quite insistently based on difference and on a collagist practice of dysraphism, which Bernstein, in a footnote to a poem given that same term as its title, defines as

a word used by specialists in congenital disease to mead a dysfunctional fusion of embryonic parts--a birth defect. Actually the word is not in Dorland's, the standard U.S. medical dictionary; but I found it "in use" by a Toronto physician, so it may be a commoner British medical usage or just something he came up with. Ralph literally means "seam," so dysraphism is mis-seaming--a prosodic device! But it has the punch of being the same root as rhapsody (raph)--or in Skeat's--"one who strings (lit. stitches) songs together, a reciter of epic poetry," cf. "ode" etc.

(The Sophist, 44)(4)

Nevertheless, acknowledging the liabilities of a thematic approach, it does seem worthwhile to ask, especially after twenty books, what are Bernstein's recurring concerns. After an initial consideration of the reception of Bernstein's writing and its place in recent representations of American literature, I will attempt to begin a thematic reading of Bernstein's most recent poetry.

An inquiry into the recurring concerns in Bernstein's poetry may also begin to answer a recurring criticism that has been directed at his poetry. Interestingly enough, this particular line of criticism has been leveled at Bernstein from opposing critical quarters. In a letter written to me seven or eight years ago, Helen Vendler acknowledged that while some of Bernstein's ideas (or poetics) were of interest, she asked (both. about Bernstein's writing and about Language poetry more generally) what was memorable about the poetry, what lines or passages were memorable or beautiful. To answer Vendler in her own terms would require a detailed (re)consideration of the memorable and the beautiful (see Gertrude Stein's "Composition as Explanation," 1926).(5) Certainly the form of much Language poetry--from Lyn Hejinian's My Life to Ron Silliman's Tjanting to Bernstein's "Standing Target"--is memorable and, arguably, beautiful. From a position which, unlike Vendler's, is generally sympathetic to innovation and experimentation, Richard Kostelanetz in his Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes discusses Bernstein in terms of complaint remarkably similar to Vendler's: